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In 2015, Sacha Romanovitch became the first female chief executive of a major British accounting firm. On Monday, she announced that she would be stepping down as CEO of Grant Thornton, a company she joined 24 years ago.

In a profile, Madison Marriage describes how Ms Romanovitch had raised eyebrows at Grant Thornton with her decision to cap her salary at 20 times that of the average employee. Some of her colleagues complained that she was pursuing a “socialist agenda”.

The firm's performance on Ms Romanovitch's watch has been mixed, but some observers wonder if a man attempting to reform the company at the speed she did would have encountered similar resistance.

Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, writes that the US must shed any illusions it harbours about Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman in the wake of the disappearance, and apparent murder, of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

The literary critic and two-time Man Booker Prize judge John Sutherlandsuggests that the award of this year's prize to Anna Burns' Milkman, a somewhat recondite novel about the Northern Irish Troubles, reflects a tension between high-mindedness and readability that was baked into the contest's original design.

Frank Field, chair of the House of Commons work and pensions committee, argues that universal credit, the government's attempt to overhaul the UK benefits system, is pushing the low paid into destitution.

Tim Harford contends that the case for drip-feed investing is plausible, but costs more.

What you've been saying

The FT continues to cleave to the formulation that German chancellor Angela Merkel was responsible for “opening Germany’s borders to refugees” in September 2015 (“Germany’s voters turn right — and left”; “Germany’s political centre cannot hold”.) Almost all sophisticated liberal commentators agree that the German border with Austria, in accordance with Schengen rules, was already open. Your columnists are often quick to regret Ms Merkel’s decision and its political consequences, but seem remarkably less willing to imagine what would have happened had she decided to close the border, an act that may well have drawn even more legal scrutiny, and courted humanitarian disaster.

A larger squeeze will be put on the UK over the coming half decade as world growth slows and the dynamic center of what global growth there is becomes more firmly rooted in the Far East and India. One suspects that the combined effect of Brexit and whatever the long-run impacts of the new Italian “exceptionalism” are will bifurcate Europe into a continent of relative winners versus relative losers. If a more cohesive Eurozone emerges (with Italy as some sort of colony similar to Greece), then the UK will have to climb over a much higher wall if it wants to get back into Europe in the future.

I trust that Norway’s decision in the 1970s not to join the European Community has no bearing on the fact that today Oslo’s citizens are happier than Helsinki’s? ( City Stats, House & Home, October 16.)